DescriptionThis dissertation seeks to advance a theoretical understanding of death anxiety as an existential phenomenon, and to apply this understanding to certain experiences observed and reported by individuals with schizophrenia. Death anxiety as a phenomenon of experience can be understood as a representation of the individual’s relationship between self and world, which is in part defined by one’s existence in the face of the inevitability of death. It is argued that a comprehensive understanding of the experience of death anxiety can be used to contextualize many of the more bizarre utterances, stated beliefs, and experiences of individuals with schizophrenia, which can aid empathic understanding in psychotherapy. In order to do this, contributions from phenomenology, especially components of the ipseity-disturbance model of schizophrenia, are used to describe normal and anomalous experiences of consciousness, temporality, embodiment, and nothingness as features of a lived ontology. After a survey of empirical literature regarding death anxiety and theoretical conceptions of death anxiety from the existential and psychoanalytic traditions, seven key concepts regarding schizophrenia are critically evaluated and compared to relevant aspects of the phenomenon of death anxiety: the concepts discussed are ineffability, hyperreflexivity, diminished presence, disturbed grip, double bookkeeping, solipsism, and engulfment. It is argued that these anomalous experiences of consciousness reflect changes in one’s ontological status, which involve disruptions, reactions, or defenses against a conventional way of relating to one’s own mortality. Phenomenology has done important work to describe the actual experiences of those whose subjectivity is difficult to explain due to psychosis. The present investigation can help to ground our understanding of the subjectivity of such individuals in a context that is common for all human beings, that of Being-towards-death.